Day: August 4, 2013

I like books set during The Jazz Age. All that reckless bravado and extravagant excess. One of my favorites is by that hard-drinking high-living writer with the stormy personal life. A charter member of the 1920’s “Lost Generation”, F. Scott Fitzgerald burned the candle at both ends with his flapper muse, Zelda, at his side. Poetic fire.

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In between parties, he sobered up enough to write his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. It’s a haunting story of a millionaire’s attempt to rekindle a past love with a society belle.

Here’s Hollywood’s latest interpretation~

Save Me The Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

They say life informs fiction. Zelda Fitzgerald was a talented writer and completed this semi-autobiographical novel while hospitalized for schizophrenia. Originally printed on cheap paper with a cover of green linen, there was no suggestion of the romantic glitter of life with Fitzgerald. A collection of their private letters is telling. The inscription on the Fitzgeralds’ shared tombstone reads: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

All familiar Jazz-Age-territory stuff. But if you want to look past the obvious, look here.

One of Wharton’s last books, she wrote Twilight Sleep in the late 1920s when more than a few people probably thought she was already dead. It’s about the Jazz-age New York society when the Four Hundred were being cast aside by a new generation. Wharton was 60 when she wrote this, but she understands and conveys the ideas and ways of a much younger generation. It’s a Fitzgerald novel written by someone who strolled arm-in-arm with Henry James.

In the 1920s people sat on flagpoles, danced the Charleston, and read a new novel called The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald called it a time when “the parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, the morals looser.” Life was lived with a vengeance. But writer Willa Cather, who grew up in a less frantic America, said that for her, the world broke in two and became an uglier place.